Some time around the 1820s, Edward Hamer's informant was walking up Long Bridge Street in Llanidloes when he saw a crowd packed into one of the yards that led off the street to a factory. He pushed through to the middle. An old woman was lying on the ground in a fit, real or put on he could not tell, and over her stood an angry middle-aged man, waving his arms and threatening to hang her from a nearby beam unless she said the word God to a child its mother was holding out in front of her.
The old woman protested that she was innocent. She said, reasonably enough, that if she did what they asked she would be standing there as a confessed witch. She fell into one fit after another and begged to be let go. For a long time there was not a sympathetic face in the crowd, until the wife of a local manufacturer came out and pleaded for her, without effect. At last, terrified and hardly knowing what she was doing, the old woman mumbled something to the child. The child smiled. The parents were satisfied the spell was broken, the crowd went away, and she was allowed to leave.
Elias Owen, as a schoolboy some years later, came on a similar crowd in Short Bridge Street, gathered round an old, frail woman who seemed to be a stranger from the hill country. He was told she was a suspected witch and was being tested. He believed she was made to kneel, say the name of God and recite the Lord's Prayer. She got through it and walked away from her judges.
Owen, a clergyman writing in the 1890s, called these ordeals ridiculous, and set them beside the older tests of weighing a witch against the church Bible and swimming her in a pond. What makes the Llanidloes cases valuable is that they are not stories. Two separate people saw them happen in the streets of a Montgomeryshire town within living memory.
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